You’re probably going to be short-stacked in every poker tournament you play, which makes short-stacked skills a must for every player to acquire. The first, and most obvious concept about playing a short stack is that it requires patience and discipline to wait for the right situation in order to try to double through an opponent and get back in the poker tournament.
Assessing the Situation
My basic strategy unifies these two, usually distinct, strategies into a single strategy that is easily learned! If you plan on following my basic strategy, which I call a generalized short-stack strategy, you should choose a poker room that has very loose players (ones that like to gamble at the poker table). In my experience, the loosest. Online Poker » Poker Strategy. In the world of poker playing there are tons of resources available when it comes to poker strategy. OnlinePoker.org is a great free resource for players to learn everything from the basic rules of poker to calculating pot odds on the fly.
When you find your stack shrinking, the first thing you need to do is to assess the situation by gathering a few facts that will put your short stack into some perspective. Just answer these few questions:
- How big is your chip stack compared to others at your table?
- How big is your chip stack compared to the size of the blinds?
- How big is your chip stack compared to the average stack?
- How many hands can you look at before you bleed to death or else have so few chips in hand that even when you do go all-in, you’re bound to be called by someone?
Consider yourself short stacked whenever you have between 10 and 20 big blinds in front of you. When you have fewer than 10 big blinds, you have no option to make plays except for folding or pushing all-in. You shouldn’t call, and shouldn’t expect that any tricky plays on your part will succeed. Your options are only two: Fold or push.
Once you have more than 20 big blinds in front of you, you have some risk-taking latitude. It’s not quite enough to play your normal tournament game, but you’re not in imminent danger.
The Shorter Your Stack, the More it Costs
As your stack gets shorter, each bet, call, or raise you make takes an increasingly larger portion of your entire tournament equity. You really can’t play drawing hands because the cost of drawing and failing is too high. As your stack gets shorter, you need to look for opportunities to move all-in. But you can’t let things get too desperate. An all-in bet with just a few chips won’t threaten anyone. An all-in bet with 15 or 20 times the big blinds is still a threat to an opponent, while an all-in move with only three times the big blinds in hand won’t scare anyone.
You Can’t Wait for a Premium Pair
When you’re short stacked, you really don’t have the latitude to wait for a big premium pair, although if you are fortunate enough to be dealt a big pocket pair, you should have no qualms about pushing all-in with them. But you also have to think about pushing with any pocket pair, A-K, A-Q, A-J, A-T, and even weaker hands, such as Ace-anything, K-Q, K-J, K-T, K-9, Q-10+, or even J-10 if you have position and a number of players have folded before it’s your turn to act.
In fact, if you’re at a fairly tight table, you can consider pushing with any two cards as long as no one has entered the pot before you, and you’re in late position. Obviously, the larger your stack, the better your chances are of succeeding.
You Have to Double Up
One of the drawbacks to being short stacked is that your opponents are all aware of your situation, and are more willing to call-in order to knock you out. This is particularly true when you’ve reached the pay ladder of a poker tournament and each player eliminated guarantees those surviving a higher pay-out.
There’s not much you can do about that; your short stack has precluded much of the maneuvering room you’d have if you owned more chips. You have to double up. Nothing else matters as much at this point in your tournament.
Forget About Protecting Your Chips
Good short stacked play breaks many of the rules of tournament poker. In a sense, your short stacked style is diametrically opposed to what you’ve learned about tournament poker. All tournament players know how important it is to protect their chips. But when you’re short stacked, you really don’t want to protect them. You want to find a good situation – that’s critical – to gamble for all your chips in an effort to get back into contention.
You have to get your chips in the middle of the table and hope for the best. Finding a good situation means you have to be first into the pot if that’s possible. Being first in means your opponents are faced with a decision to call or fold. If you are not first into the pot and come in calling – or even raising for all your chips – you have less chance of winning the pot without having to show down the best hand.
A limper in front of you might be someone with a premium hand who’s hoping another player raises so he can come over the top. If there’s a raiser in the pot before you act, you need a very strong hand to re-raise for all your chips. Without a big holding you have to release any of those marginal poker hands you were hoping to play unless, of course, you are so short stacked that you have no other option.
Short Stacked Play is Simplified Poker
Bluffing, calling and floating, and other sophisticated poker plays are predicated on an ability to make creative moves based on your read of your opponent and not necessarily on the strength or potential of your hand. While creative plays have their place at the poker table, just forget about them when you’re short stacked because you’re in a position where the cost of trying a sophisticated play and failing is something you can no longer afford.
As opposed to making big bets on the turn and river, as you’d be prone to with an average sized stack or larger, when you’re short stacked most of your action will take place before the flop or on it. In essence, when you’re short stacked, the last thing you want to do is play a hand to the showdown. You want to bet – and win – early.
Implied Odds Are Not Important
With a short stack, the concept of implied odds also goes out the window. You simply don’t have enough chips to win a large pot on a later betting round. If all you have are 10 or 15 times the big blind, you won’t win any big pots, because you don’t have enough chips to play anything but a smallish, all-in pot.
Playing mid-range and smallish suited connectors, and set-mining with small pairs are also strategies you can toss out of your toolbox when short stacked. They come with a cost and the chance of succeeding with hands like these are small.
Short stacked play means you need to get your money all-in with a big pair or big connectors and hope to win by making top pair with a strong kicker.
Don’t Limp-in if You’re Short Stacked
If you are a short stack, you’ll need to avoid the temptation to limp-in and hope to catch part of the flop inexpensively. If you’re down to 10 big blinds or fewer, you need to go all-in if you play a hand. With 15 or more big blinds, you can afford to make your usual raise . If you have between 10 and 15 big blinds, you’re in the judgment zone and will have to decide whether to go all-in or make a standard raise.
Online Poker Short Stack Strategy List
It may seem like a good idea to limp-in and try to catch a good flop inexpensively, but it is more profitable to raise and build the pot with a strong starting hand.
Be Selective; Be Aggressive
If you haven’t gone all-in on the flop, once the flop is exposed you will have a choice to make: push or fold. That’s it. No other options. It’s all or nothing when you see the flop short stacked.
If it looks as if someone else will bet if you check, you are usually better off being the aggressor instead of the caller. If you come out betting, your opponent might fold. If he bets and you call all-in, then you’ve relegated yourself to having to win at the showdown, if you are to win at all.
Conclusion
Here are the three main things to keep in mind when you’re short stacked in a poker tournament:
- Don’t speculate
- Commit while you still have enough chips
- Be first into the pot
You can’t play a small pocket pair in hopes of flopping a set, and you can’t play mid-range suited connectors when you’re a short stack because the odds against hitting your hand are long. Even when you do get lucky, you’re so short stacked that the amount you can win is reduced. Moreover, you can’t take the risk of calling only to have to release your hand if the flop misses you. Be sure the short stacked hands you play are those you’re willing to go to the mat with. You don’t have enough chips to play hit-to-win poker. Go all the way or don’t go at all.
If you are really close to the felt, you have to commit to a hand – and it might just be any hand – while you still have enough chips to convince opponents that folding is in their best interest (also known as fold equity). If you have just a few chips left, you’re going to have to win at the showdown to win at all. There’s a difference between playing with a short stack and playing with barely any chips at all.
Before pushing all-in as a short stack, be sure you’re first into the pot or you have very good cards. If you have 10 big blinds, you still have enough chips to threaten opponents and they will still need a decent hand to call. But if you are not first into the pot, you need a big hand to play because you will probably have to go to the river to win.
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By Lou Krieger
The author of many best-selling poker books, including “Hold’em Excellence” and “Poker for Dummies”. A true ambassador of the game and one of poker’s greatest ever teachers.
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I’m doing a series of companion articles to my most recent book, The Course: Serious Hold ’Em Strategy For Smart Players. It’s a step-by-step guide to mastering the live no-limit hold’em games that you will find in most cardrooms around the world.
The companion chapter in The Course to this article is called Playing Deep. Games at the $5-$10 level and higher tend to play substantially deeper stacked than games at the $1-$2 through $2-$5 levels. If you want to master play at these higher stakes, it’s important that you learn to thrive when the stacks get deep.
But this article is going to be about the opposite—how to play in $5-$10 games (and above) with a relatively short stack. I wanted to write about this because I feel the single best way for many players to move up into the higher stakes games from $2-$5 is to start out buying in for the table minimum. There are a few reasons I recommend this.
First, it serves to defray some of the money jitters. In a typical $2-$5 game, most players will have piles of $5 red chips in front of them with a few $25 green chips or $100 black chips as well. At $5-$10, you’ll often see players with a few stacks of $10 chips and then possibly multiple stacks of green and black chips. The blinds have only doubled, but the money can feel much, much bigger.
If you buy into this $5-$10 game for the $600 table minimum, then even while half the table has black chips everywhere, you really aren’t putting more money at risk than you are already comfortable with risking at $2-$5. If you feel like you might get intimidated by the atmosphere of a $5-$10 or higher game, buying in for the minimum can help you get your feet wet without diving in head first.
Second, buying in short simplifies the game. Eventually if your goal is to win the most money possible, you want as much complexity as possible. But in the beginning, simplifying the game can help you get acclimated. There’s no reason in your first few hours at a higher level to get yourself into a situation where you’re trying to sniff out a bluff for $2,000 on the river. Buying in short will mostly protect you from wandering unprepared into these sorts of harrowing situations.
Third, buying in short gives you a structural advantage in the game. At some tables this advantage will be small, but at other tables it will give you an edge big enough by itself to let you beat the rake or time charge. I’ve talked about this intrinsic advantage many times before, so I will keep the discussion here brief. Different stack sizes call for different strategies. If your opponents are playing $3,000 stacks, then they must play one strategy against each other and a markedly different one against you and your $600 stack. Whereas if you are the shortest stack at the table, you are playing just a single strategy against all of your opponents.
If you buy into a higher stakes game for the minimum, you should generally keep two things in mind. Your strategy should mostly revolve around trying to get money in good with strong hands rather than bluffing.
And your opponents at $5-$10 will typically be better hand readers than the opponents you are used to. If you take nitty lines against them all the time, they will stop giving you action. Even the recreational players at $5-$10 can find folds that players at lower stakes might not.
Free Poker Strategy
But if you play in a way that obfuscates your hand strength, they will give you plenty of action because they are used to aggressive players who bluff regularly. If you are not transparent with your attempts to get action, you should get all the action you need with your short stack.
It’s $5-$10 and you have a $600 stack. You have K K. There are enough loose and aggressive players at your table to build big pots regularly.
A loose player opens for $40 from five off the button. The next player folds. It’s your action. You can three-bet here, but you can also just call and give your opponents a chance to start the action at least on the flop.
You call. The player in the cutoff also calls. There are three players to the flop and $135 in the pot with $560 behind.
The flop comes 10 7 5. The preflop raiser bets $80.
I like shoving all-in here. Your opponents will be used to flop aggression, and there are any number of flush and/or straight draws you could be shoving with. You can expect to get called by either of your opponents (but particularly the preflop raiser) if they have a hand of any real strength.
The key here is that your stack is short, and the shoving play can easily be interpreted as a draw. This combination will tend to get you plenty of action.
If you had three-bet preflop, one of two things could have gone wrong. First, your opponents could have folded immediately to the preflop three-bet. Any reasonably aware opponent would know that a three-bet from three off the button with such a short stack would signify a very strong range.
Second, even if called preflop, you likely wouldn’t have gotten a natural opportunity to shove the flop. The most likely action after three-betting would be that everyone would fold to the preflop raiser who would call and then check any flop. You could of course shove at that point, and you might get called, but it’s a strange play that will get your opponent thinking.
Short Stack Strategy Chart
A more natural play would be to bet perhaps $120 on the flop leaving one bet behind for the turn. But in this scenario, your opponent would have to call you twice to get the money in.
All-in-all, while there’s nothing wrong with playing the K-K in the straightforward way of betting and raising at every opportunity, whether you get maximum action playing this way will be dependent upon how you play other hands and what impression your opponents have of your play. If your opponents think you are nitty, you will find that they get away from top pair against your overpairs even for just 60 big blinds.
By playing it the way I recommended, however, your hand will blend easily into how you might play a range of other hands, and it will be impossible for your opponents to fold consistently.
If you buy in short, usually go for value, and attempt to play in deceptive ways that foil your opponents’ hand reading strengths, you should transition smoothly from $2-$5 to higher stakes. ♠
Ed’s newest book, The Course: Serious Hold ‘Em Strategy For Smart Players is available now at his website edmillerpoker.com. You can also find original articles and instructional videos by Ed at the training site redchippoker.com.
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